Judeo-Christian-Islamic Ontology

The three religious groups comprising Western culture share a common root ontology. On the surface, this claim may appear absurd, but deeper analysis shows that any differences among these three religious traditions are purely superficial. All three religions subscribe to identical core values. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic ontology (JCI) may be summarized as follows:

• There is an immanent spiritual world with many realms where both good and evil beings reside.
• The Supreme Being created the material universe, and then retired from creative activities.
• Human beings are inherently evil, sinful and condemned.
• Salvation from sin and material existence is possible only through the intervention of a divine intermediary.
• After salvation we keep the same identity we have now, even our present relatives and pets.
• God communicates only with a few people, most of whom died long ago.
• Truth is the consensus understanding of human society, arrived at by a process of argument and debate.
• Although in theory God controls everything, in practice our actions cause the results we get.
• Human beings are the owners and controllers of the universe, by the will of God.
• It is possible to represent and model anything, even God, using numbers and mathematics.
• Both human and divine law are based on the principle of revenge: ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
• Any violence committed in the course of expanding the influence of one’s religious group is not a sin.
• Our religious group is the only valid and true one; all others are false and inimical.
• God’s favor upon a person can be measured by material success.

We need not repeat the lessons of history herein to assess the deficiencies of the JCI ontology. The last 5,000 years have shown us clearly that the result of JCI is nothing but endless greed, exploitation, deception and war without resolution. This may be practical, even beneficial for survival when the social groups concerned are minor tribes occupying relatively insignificant areas of land; but when the protagonists are global superpowers armed with potent nuclear and biological weapons, the inadequacy of the JCI ontology shows up with startling clarity.

We all are familiar with downloading and applying patches to fix software bugs and security vulnerabilities. We also know that patching a complex system inevitably leads to introducing new, unknown failure modes. As we enter the 21^st century, the JCI ontology has been ‘patched’ so many times that it contains innumerable internal contradictions and errors. Processing these exceptions makes our thinking so inefficient that it becomes progressively more difficult to arrive at any firm conclusion sufficiently robust to withstand additional semantic and/or ontological failures.

As meaning evaporates, basic concepts like good and bad become reversed in popular culture and even in language. Compliments become insults, and insults compliments. The inversion of values produces an entertainment media whose wares constitute a ‘vast wasteland’ according to the government officials responsible for regulating it, yet no one seriously proposes to do anything about it. Education ceases even to resemble training in higher cultural values, and becomes a meaningless game of social control and endless regurgitation of force-fed ‘facts.’ These ‘facts,’ when studied closely and traced back to their source, more often than not turn out to be only the latest fashion in pseudo-scientific speculation and propaganda from some self-appointed Guardians of the Ontology.

It would be a simple matter indeed to take each and every principle of JCI ontology enumerated above and subject it to a devastating critical evaluation, but it is less exhausting for both writer and reader to just accept that the JCI system is failing. The evidence is there in every newspaper. It is crashing just like an outdated software system that gradually uses more and more of its resources to correct internal errors, reducing the performance available for the users’ applications until the entire system freezes in an abnormal termination. The purpose of this essay is to help the reader avoid that final devastating crash, which at the time of this writing is certainly no more than a decade away.

Western Empirical Scientific Ontology

The Western Empirical Scientific ontology (WES) is one of the principal culprits in the degeneration and failure of JCI ontology. WES began as ‘natural philosophy,’ an attempt to understand natural processes through reason. Its politicization and use against the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church during the so-called Enlightenment led to the expansion and enthronement of WES as an alternate for JCI ontology, when in reality WES is a completely dependent subprogram of JCI. Without JCI to fight against, WES would never have achieved any prominence, except perhaps as an adjunct to engineering and economic development.

The greatest weakness of WES is that it denies the existence of any phenomenon incapable of objective empirical verification, automatically excluding the entire subjective domain of consciousness from its investigations. To deny the existence of consciousness is the ultimate absurdity; in the absence of consciousness, there simply are no other issues. Consciousness is the fundamental fact of human existence; to remove it from the center of the pursuit of knowledge is the fatal error ultimately causing the crash of JCI. For without scientific knowledge of consciousness, human life is simply meaningless. Nevertheless, JCI has become so dependent on WES that the fatal error in the latter inevitably leads to the crash of the entire system.

These ontologies and Transontology are summarized in a table by one of our students.

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